The Little Black Dress Page 5

  So after a few weeks of total despair, I decided I might as well go back to school and try filling my head with something else. I had already heard some of the stories circulating around the campus from Wendy. Wendy had been extremely sweet and sympathetic during these weeks and kept appearing at my house every afternoon with offerings of junk food or some specialty her maid Delia had cooked up to entice me into eating again. I could never summon any appetite, but I appreciated the effort she made. She kept up a cheerful chatter about events on campus that buzzed around my head somewhere but never connected, but when she began to tell me the stories circulating about Carmen’s ghost, I began to listen. At first I didn’t believe something like this could actually be happening, and it only made me angry. I dismissed it as an “instant urban myth,” and I was totally appalled something like this could arise out of something so real and tragic as Carmen’s death.

  When I finally returned to school, the tales of the “beautiful but vengeful ghost” who stalked the halls of Uni High had become pretty well established. Sightings of Carmen’s ghost had become the talk of the lunchroom, so after a few days back, I figured I better find out what was really going on.

  It seemed to have started with what I would call aural hallucinations. Boys reported hearing the sound of footsteps, high-heeled shoes tapping down the tile floors of the school’s corridors. The sound would always seem to be coming from just ahead of them, just around the next corner, or just behind them, but when they turned around, there was nobody there, and if they ran to catch up and see what was around the next corner, there was never anyone there either. All the boys said it sounded exactly like Carmen striding down the hall in her high-heeled shoes and little black dress.

  Then, about a week after I started back at school, I was called in to the vice principal’s office. The vice principal was in charge of discipline in the school, and I, Lucy Linsky, had never in all my career at Uni High been called in to his office. So it was with curiosity as well as trepidation that I approached the administration’s receptionist and asked why I had been summoned.

  The vice principal came out to greet me and took me into his office, all solemn and solicitous the way all the teachers had been treating me lately. He asked me how I was doing and actually pulled out a chair for me to sit on. Then he got to the point.

  “Lucy,” he began, looking very serious and directing an accusatory gaze my way, “I wonder if you have heard the rumors that have been going around the school recently.”

  “What rumors would those be?” I asked, feigning innocence.

  He put his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his knuckles and looked at me with a steady gaze. “Several of the boys on campus have been reporting strange noises near the boys’ locker room. They seem to think the school is haunted.”

  I just sat there and looked at him as if he was crazy.

  “I’m not saying that the school is haunted, I am just telling you what some of the reports are that I’ve been hearing,” he said.

  “What kind of noises are they hearing that makes them think the school is haunted?” I asked, still playing innocent. “Rattling chains?”

  “No, actually, the boys are reporting the sound of high-heeled shoes following them down the hallway. They say they have that peculiar echoing ring that Carmen’s shoes always made. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

  “Excuse me,” I said, truly mystified now, “are you thinking I have something to do with those noises?”

  “Well, I know you have a friend whose father is a film director. I thought you might be playing some kind of trick, using his help?” He looked at me accusingly again, and I could not believe what I was hearing.

  “You really think I would have anything to do with that?” I was furious now. “I would never do anything like that. I would never do anything that might injure Carmen’s memory for me. Never!” I was on my feet now, almost crying.

  He must have believed me, because he backtracked pretty quickly and apologized mightily, and I left his office more perplexed than ever. How could this be happening?

  Then the sightings began. Boys started reporting actually seeing Carmen—or who they thought might be Carmen. They reported seeing a beautiful girl walking down the hall a little way in front of them. She was wearing high-heeled shoes and a little black dress, and she was always only a little bit ahead, just out of reach. For some reason, they couldn’t resist trying to catch up to her. But every time they got close, she would turn a corner, and when they followed her, she would vanish in the blink of an eye.

  They all seemed to find this terrifying, and most of them would turn and run away as fast as they could. These sightings were reported so often it seemed to be some form of male hysteria. At least that’s what James and I concluded. After my experience with the vice principal, I began to discuss the phenomenon with James. I needed someone to confide in, someone who knew Carmen and had an IQ that would enable them to see past the common perceptions.

  James and I had started hanging out at Pips Coffee Shop in Westwood Village. It had a parking lot that was easy to use and served endless cups of coffee. It also had pretty good cheesecake, and if you ever went there for breakfast, it had these cool toasters on each table, where you could make your own toast, which meant yours would never get cold. Anyway, I liked it there. It made me feel grown-up to sit there sipping black coffee and talking to James, who already seemed pretty grown-up to me.

  “Well, I’m no psychologist, but it sounds like some kind of mass ‘male hysteria,’” James suggested over a big slice of Black Forest cake. “Have you seen or heard anything yourself?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I answered. “And that’s the weird part. If there was such a thing as ghosts and Carmen was one, wouldn’t you think she would appear to me, of all people?”

  “Yeah, or even to me.” James agreed. “You say most of the sightings are around the boys’ locker room?” He looked perplexed, and he frowned at his forkful of cake before it disappeared into his mouth. He had a strangely feminine mouth, with small, soft-looking pink lips, the opposite of Carmen’s mouth, whose lips were full and shapely. In fact, he was almost the complete opposite of Carmen in every way. He had a round face and small, very blue eyes. He wore his blond hair short, probably because he was at a military academy, but he still didn’t look like a soldier. He looked like what he was: a gentle young man and my friend.

  “Wendy and I were thinking that maybe jocks are more susceptible to this kind of hysteria,” I said, driving thoughts of Carmen out of my head and trying to concentrate on her ghost. “We’ve tried hanging out near the locker room, pretending we were on hall patrol so as not to act suspicious, but neither of us have seen or heard anything.”

  “Maybe it’s just a hoax,” James suggested, “to keep nerds out of the boys’ locker room.”

  “You would think so,” I said, watching the waitress refill my mug for the umpteenth time, “but it’s actually the jocks themselves who are getting scared. In fact, they seem downright terrified!”

  James and I went over and over it, but the more we discussed it, the more incomprehensible it seemed.

  I was still angry about Carmen’s death and overwhelmingly sad. I could not imagine there would ever be a time when I could get over it. I was angry at the universe, and I was angry at the police for not finding her killers, but mostly I was consumed by the fiercest anger for the creeps who had done this to Carmen.

  It was my own anger that led me to gradually believe in the possibility that Carmen could be haunting the school. After all, in a universe as perverse as this one, where someone as beautiful and special as Carmen could be murdered and have to spend the last hours of her life on earth being tortured and abused in such a horrific way, anything could be possible. Why wouldn’t her young soul come back to haunt the rest of us?

  If I was angry, she must be furious. I had seen her fury before, and I knew she held an unfathomable depth of rage inside her, and now? After
what they had put her through? Her rage must have been monumental. I could believe she would be out for revenge, and it looked as if she was going to take her fury out on the boys at my school, especially the jocks.

  I wondered about that.

  CHAPTER 8

  JONNY FREEMAN

  THINGS ESCALATED with the strange case of Jonny Freeman. Jonny Freeman was one of the popular kids in our school, but he had a particularly unpleasant notoriety among the female population. He was an incredibly hot-looking guy, very handsome and very rich. He wasn’t particularly smart, so he wasn’t in any of my classes, but he was one of the “in crowd,” the crème de la crème of the fashionable elite, and hung out with the hottest of the jocks, the captain of the football team, Luke “Skywalker” Ritter, even though he didn’t play football. Jonny had earned his letter in track.

  I had seen Jonny around campus, always surrounded by his cool buddies, and I had heard a lot of the gossip about him, usually from behind the stalls in the girls’ bathroom. Stories about how he kept a running score on his phone that would text all his buddies automatically whenever he made another of his so-called conquests.

  His so-called conquests were really just date rapes, which happened to be one of my pet peeves. I kept reading about these idiots who didn’t believe date rape exists. They were usually men with no daughters or boys with no sisters, because everyone else knew it was real, and it was creepy and it was very, very wrong.

  Anyway, Jonny Freeman was infamous for his disgusting dating behavior, what even the boys liked to call “scoring at any cost.” His reputation was so bad that only a girl new to the school or one who had a very large older brother living in town or one who was foolish enough to think he wouldn’t try it out on her, would go out with him. His tactics were always the same. He would invite some pretty and clueless young girl for a date. Just a dinner date, he would say, to get to know her. He would be smooth and charming, and he was cute as hell, so he was hard to resist.

  He would pick her up at her house in his fancy Lotus sports car with the top down and take her to one of those “in” places on Melrose for dinner and sweet talk her all night. Then, on the drive home, he would take a little detour up Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive was not just a movie. It was an incredibly long and winding road that went over nearly every mountain pass and through every canyon and overlook in LA between the Hollywood Bowl and the town of Encino. Miles and miles long—and very steep, winding, and treacherous!

  He would drive way up Mulholland Drive, so far up the girl would become suspicious and say she had to get home now. But he would laugh and smile charmingly and tell her there was this terrific view he was taking her to, it was such a beautiful night, she shouldn’t miss it. And he would pull in to this secluded overlook where there was truly an outstanding view with Hollywood all lit up beneath her, and it would take her breath away and be oh-so-romantic, and soon he would be kissing her, and the next minute he would be pinning her arms behind her back and tearing her clothes off.

  Now, some girls were happy to get it on with a hot guy from the in crowd on their first date—and that was fine, but if you weren’t one of these and you would prefer not to get it on with Jonny Freeman on your first date, it didn’t matter one bit to Jonny, because he was going to have you anyway, and he didn’t care whether you wanted to or not.

  If you were one of the few who managed to fight him off and get yourself out of the car, you knew you would be facing several miles of deserted road and would have to make it down in your high-heeled shoes. That prospect wasn’t so attractive either, so a lot of girls just gave in to him to save themselves the terrifying walk home. But a few girls managed to fight him off and were willing to hobble down the hill carrying their shoes. The rest let themselves be raped and kept their mouths shut because Jonny Freeman was in the most elite clique in the school and there was no way anyone was going to touch him.

  Of course, a few of the girls did tell, which was how even I, someone who was not a member of any crowd, in or out, knew, because it turned out that Wendy was one of the girls who’d hobbled home carrying her shoes.

  I was lying on my bed reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because I was naïve enough to believe it was worth reading, when I heard this strange scratching sound. I got out of bed to investigate. The sound was coming from outside my back windows, and I realized somebody was scratching on my window screen. For a moment, I was scared, but then I remembered that when we were kids, Wendy and I used to sneak into each other’s bedrooms in the middle of the night. We’d creep down into each other’s backyards and scratch on the screens until one or the other of us would open the window and pop out the screen so we could climb right into each other’s houses without our parents being the wiser.

  Sure enough, when I opened the drapes, there was Wendy, standing outside my window and trying to keep the top of her dress up while holding her shoes in one hand and scratching on my screen with the other. I opened the window immediately and popped out the screen. She threw her shoes over the windowsill and climbed right in.

  She looked a mess. Her feet were bloody, and her knees were scraped and bleeding, and her pretty green dress was ripped right down the front. I’m sure that dress cost a mint too.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “Shh,” she whispered right away. “I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

  “Don’t worry. My folks are in bed on the other side of the house. But what’s going on? What happened? You look like you’ve been raped!”

  She collapsed on my little sofa then and started crying. “I’m an idiot,” she said through her sobs. “I went out with Jonny Freeman.”

  “You didn’t!” I said. “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she repeated. “I think I was flattered or something. He only asks out the really pretty girls. I thought there was nothing he could do to me. That, you know, I thought I could handle him.”

  “Oh, Wendy,” I said and sat down on the sofa next to her and put my arms around her. “You poor thing. What did he do? He didn’t rape you, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t, but not for want of trying.”

  “But what happened? What happened to your dress?”

  “I’m just lucky I got away.” Wendy shook her head and looked down at her torn dress. Then she looked up at me. “He’s a lot stronger than he looks.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Wendy leaned her head back against the sofa and took a deep breath. She was still trying to cover her breasts with her torn dress, but she had stopped crying now and just looked at me with swollen blue eyes.

  “He took me to this really nice restaurant. The one my dad’s always talking about. The Ivy. He seemed sweet. I mean he acted sweet. He treated me like a real date.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe anything she was saying. “He asked me all about my dancing and didn’t ask me about my dad, like everyone else always does. It was nice, and the dinner was lush.”

  “And then?”

  “After dinner, we got back in his car, and I assumed he would just take me home. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard, and before I knew it, he turned the car, and we were heading up Mulholland Drive! I told him right away that he had to stop and take me home, but he just laughed and kept on driving.” Wendy looked at me with angry red-rimmed eyes. “I thought about jumping out of the car, but he was driving so fast, I didn’t dare. I started yelling at him to stop the car. Do you know what he said? He told me to shut up and stop being a little bitch. He actually called me a little bitch!”

  “God, what an asshole!” I said.

  “I tried another tactic, and I began to cry. I pleaded with him to take me home, but that only seemed to make him more determined, because he started driving even faster. So I stopped crying and tried threatening him. I told him that if he did anything to me, my dad would have him killed.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said,
‘You’re not going to tell your dad anything.’ By then we were way up there at the top of the canyon, miles away. That’s when he finally stopped the car. He pulled in to this parking spot, like a lover’s lane or something, and unbuckled his seat belt. Then he said, ‘Come on Wendy, enjoy the view.’ Like we were on a real date or something.”

  “What a jerk.”

  “Before I could do anything, he unsnapped my seat belt and reached over and pushed me back against the car door. He already had both hands on my breasts. He didn’t even bother trying to kiss me. He just started mashing my breasts and pushing me back against the door. I was trying to push him away with one hand and trying to get my other hand behind me to open the door, but he had me pinned against it. The next thing I knew, he grabbed the top of my dress and pulled it down, and it just ripped apart.” Wendy looked down at her torn dress again. “It’s silk. Then he grabbed the front of my bra and yanked it so hard it broke and came away in his hands. I think he hurt me when he did that. Can you take a look at my back? It feels like he cut me when he ripped off my bra.”

  I unzipped the back of what was left of Wendy’s dress. Sure enough, there were welts on her back where her bra had cut into her and a small gash, probably from the clasp. “Yes, you’re pretty bruised, and there’s a cut too. We should probably get you cleaned up. You can use my shower, and then we can put some ointment on your cuts and get some arnica on those bruises.”

  “Thank you, Lucy,” she said, gratefully. She leaned back against the sofa again, still trying to cover her chest with her torn dress.